Future Fossils

This week we continue the ecstatically futural mind-jazz duet with cyborg performance artist and body-machine interface master hacker Onyx Ashanti, exploring the frontiers of new meta-languages emerging at the intersection of the born and manufactured, and creative possibilities thereof. Onyx Online:http://onyx-ashanti.comhttp://youtube.com/onyxashantihttp://twitter.com/onyxashantiAnyone who enjoys this episode will also like these essays from my upcoming book:“The Future is More of Everything”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-2-the-future-is-entropic-2faa4aa6f433“The Future Is Disgusting”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-disgusting-911379af30fe“Being Every Drone: The Future of XR & Robotic Telepresence”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78In this episode, we discuss:Fractal Sonocybernetics & The Future of LanguageThe neurological and experiential differences between speaking and singing

This week’s guest is the one-of-a-kind, ever-evolving Onyx Ashanti, a cyborg performance artist of world renown, who is as busy as anyone I know (in the words of Terence McKenna) “immanentizing the Eschaton” with his intensely futuristic machine interfaces as an extension of his cymatic, fractal, exponentiating, indomitably cool and strange philosophy. Onyx is one of the most inspiring and creative people in my network and even though this episode was recorded in December 2017 – and is in some ways just a little dated – it’s still 99% WAY, WAY in our future. A paradox! Just how we like it, around here…http://onyx-ashanti.com/https://www.youtube.com/user/onyxashantihttps://www.facebook.com/onyxashanti“We have access to technologies and information that are only limited by our abilities to comprehend them.”The creative potentials of encrypted distributed ledgers “that aren’t just about holding until I’m a millionaire.”Marshall McLuhan: “The future of the future is the now.”The uncontrollability of new technolog

This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:Subscribe on Patr

Former NASA-JPL Mission Architect and founder of the Exploration Institute, Armin Ellis helps people think big and execute visionary projects for a living. He’s also now the Mission Architect for the Arch Mission Project, a group committed to getting long-lasting civilizational archives carried into deep space by other missions. Armin is exactly the guy to talk to if you want to think the future’s somewhere you would like to live…Watch the entire uncut video on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/posts/20404177Armin's projects:http://exploration.institutehttp://pioneerscircle.comhttps://archmission.org“I really do believe that the future is pretty bright for us.”A rallying cry to not let our amygdalae rule us, to not succumb to fear and desperation.How working on a Mars rover mission helped him develop a humility and appreciation for complexity.“Ego slows us down. It makes us stupider, you know? I’m not sure there are too many intelligent people out there. I think there are people who embrace intelligent practice

One third of American adolescents are on medication – half of that number, on psychoactive prescriptions. We have an educational system that not only can’t prepare young people for the rapidly evolving future world we’re creating for them to inhabit – it traumatizes people by attempting to squeeze every kind of human through the same twelve-plus-year sentence of indoctrination and obedience training. Are damaged and addicted mind control slaves really who we hope we’re shaping? Obviously not! That’s where the radical (yet common sense and plainly reasonable) ideas of Michael Strong come in. Michael has devoted his life to establishing new education systems that prepare young people for a lifelong learning process, to think for themselves and find their self-esteem in cultivated excellence, not rote memorization or decontextualized performance. Civilization might mean domesticated people…but do want to live in the Calcutta Zoo?In this week’s episode, I speak with Michael Strong – about how he sees the future e

Lydia Violet Harutoonian is a badass Armenian-American violinist and folktronica artist who has played with some of today’s juiciest crossover acts, including Rising Appalachia and The Polish Ambassador, in addition to launching her own solo project this year. She also works with the supremely wise Buddhist deep ecologist Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects, and leads singing workshops in which she applies her lifetime of music and work with Macy to teach music as a form of collective healing.Links:https://lydiafiddle.comhttps://workthatreconnects.orgWe Discuss:• How being monogamous in San Francisco is practically a form of bondage – a delicious kind, one expression of love in a whole ecology of relational styles;• The collaborative and improvisational super powers of the unique musical instrument we call a violin;• How can we use music to metabolize our fear and grief as communities?;• The power of song in building resilience;• Working with Joanna Macy on The Work That Reconnects;• How the expanded, int

This episode’s guest is Arthur Brock, currency design expert and lead visionary behind the Holochain project – which just might be the basis for the truly free, encrypted, peer-to-peer, surveillance-resistant, voluntary, non-exploitative Web we’ve all been dreaming about since the 1990s.Described by many as a “blockchain killer,” Holochain offers users an endlessly scalable and secure decentralized platform for our lives online, inspired by the fractal branching flows and emergent order we observe in nature.You don’t have to be a cryptocurrency enthusiast or economics wonk to appreciate the smarts and wisdom that Art brings to his work – or to understand why he’s spent the last ten years teaching people about a new paradigm of currency and governance.This is an introduction to a whole new way of thinking about what matters most to you – whatever that might be – as well as how Art and the Holochain team are working day and night to help us ditch the scarcity mindset, and to give us the tools for building a mor

This week’s guest is George Dvorsky, futurist, science journalist, and long-time contributing editor at legendary sci/fi blog io9 at http://gizmodo.com.http://twitter.com/dvorskyhttp://kinja.com/georgedvorskyhttp://www.sentientdevelopments.com/https://io9.gizmodo.com/20-crucial-terms-every-21st-century-futurist-should-kno-1545499202We Discuss:• Today’s explosive evolution of AI personal assistants, and where it’s heading…• Will children today, immersed in a world of AI dolls and smarthome devices that speak to them by name, grow up with a different idea of what entities deserve our moral concern?• The pressing cybersecurity and surveillance problems we encounter in the process of filling our lives with internet-connected devices.• Autonomous vehicles and weapons and the ethics of machine intelligence.• The history of our attempts to suppress or prevent the industrialization of warfare.• AI as proxy selves that we can deputize to act as us, on our behalf…• What kind of literacies will we need to have in a worl

This week’s guest is James Eggleston, research and business development at Power Ledger, a blockchain software company helping the world build a resilient decentralized electrical utilities networks that’s more resistant to the turbulence of our century – and lets all of us participate in and earn from distributed power production.Power Ledger:https://powerledger.io/https://twitter.com/powerledger_io?lang=enJames:https://twitter.com/jamesbychance?lang=enWe Discuss:• The history of dematerialization and the shift from things to data;• The logic and practice of decentralizing our infrastructure;• Why solar makes more sense than coal, no matter what you believe;• How we’re going to build a distributed global renewable energy market;• How we can have a tech-positive attitude and answer to existential risk (ie, the Yellowstone Supervolcano, super solar flares, massive cyberattacks, etc.);• How James integrates the principle of resilience into his whole life – in particular, his commitment to intense physical train

Visionary artist Archan Nair joins Future Fossils this week for an infectiously fun conversation about the new creative opportunities of the digital age.http://www.archann.net/• How learning to use new tools is a little like dying;• Archan’s history of using computers for art;• The feedback loop between evolving tools and evolving artists;• How to stay clear-eyed and full-hearted about the always-on awesomeness of the world, and not let the daily BS drag you down;• The role of the nondual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta in his life and creative process;• The exclusivity of the present when we investigate subjectivity (“The past and future don’t exist; only now exists”)• How is the all-encompassing now of eastern mysticism different from the “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now” of our eidetic and prophetic virtual existences?• What does the practice of Vedanta teach us about how to receive rapid change as an opportunity for transformation rather than as an overwhelm and assault on what we hold dear?• The

“The best anti-virus is common sense.”This episode’s guest is Dylan Curran, a cybersecurity specialist who recently went viral after his exposé tweets about the personal information Google and Facebook collected about him were shared by Edward Snowden. Strap in for an uncomfortable close look at just how little privacy we have online – it’s even worse than you already knew – but also, some straight, practical advice for how to navigate the “glass house” we all live in now, with safety, dignity, and savvy.Dylan:https://twitter.com/iamdylancurranhttp://dylancurran.netHere is his epic Twitter thread about how “The internet knows more about you than you do”:https://twitter.com/i/moments/977591863732527106Dylan works with two privacy-focused search engines:http://duckduckgo.comhttp://presearch.org• Why there isn’t any good way to hide who you are online anymore;• The difference between anonymity and pseudonymity, and why that matters to everyone investing in blockchain tech and crypto assets;• Why our notions of p

Self-aware machines, organs on a chip, brain-entangled meta-human military units, smart-sensor-gridded coral reefs, drone flocks, DNA-based computing, robots having baby robots…the line between the “made” and “born” is getting blurrier and blurrier each day. What does it mean to be alive in a time when we already treat the corporation as a legal person, fall in love with chat bots, and “possess” telepresence robots in virtual reality for work?This talk is a three-part argument:1 - The Internet is usefully understood as a psychedelic substance, in that it remixes what we ordinarily think of as “inside” and “outside,” “self” and “other.”2 - The psychological effects of the Internet are, then, usefully addressed through the methods of psychedelic harm reduction (like MAPS’ Zendo Project, techniques developed by the Women’s Visionary Congress, or KosmiCare in Europe).3 - Because the Internet remixes everything, it casts our categories of “made” and “born,” “alive” and “mechanical” into question – and suggests a m

This episode’s guest is David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute – the world’s pre-eminent research center for complexity science. We discuss SFI’s new Interplanetary Project and how they are weaving scientists, engineers, science fiction authors, concept artists, and musicians together into a new collaborative storytelling and visioning project about how we can sustainably scale human civilization beyond Earth – and help spark a renaissance of Big Picture thinking and Big Problem solving worthy of our species in this century.About SFI and the Interplanetary Project:https://santafe.edu/research/initiatives/interplanetary-projectAbout the Interplanetary Fest:https://interplanetaryfest.org/lineupCool local news coverage about David & The Interplanetary Project:https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2017/07/11/out-of-this-world/“Part of my job, and SFI’s job, is to not allow people to imagine that they’re living in isolation – IN ANY SENSE. Right? Socially, intellectually, economically, tech

Terry Patten is a lifelong practitioner of both contemplative spirituality and real-world activism whose new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide To Inner Work for Holistic Change, gives us lucid instructions for how we can start to ask the hardest questions and engage the toughest problems in our age of global transformation.https://www.terrypatten.com/a-new-republic-of-the-heart/I met Terry in 2005 when he was teaching how to recognize and integrate the psychological “shadow,” our repressed unconscious, at a seminar for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. His warmth, humility, and generosity of spirit is palpable in this conversation, and reflects the decades of experience that has inspired his latest writing…it’s an honor to have Terry on the show, thirteen years after he transformed my life by teaching me how to engage and love the hardest, most unpleasant parts of my own mind.In one of Future Fossils Podcast’s most vulnerable episodes yet,We Discuss:- How to deal with new

Patricia Gray is an animal music researcher, working with all kinds of creatures (humans, whales, songbirds, bonobos, even coral reefs) to understand what functions pitch and rhythm have in animal communication, how the sound of our living planet is actually a symphony of hidden meaning, and how to improve our lives by embracing the innate musicality of our human brains.https://research.uncg.edu/patricia-gray/We Discuss:• How she went from being a concert pianist to the chamber music director for the National Academy of Sciences to the piano-playing lead of a National Science Foundation-funded research lab;(http://www.wildmusic.org/research)• How our understanding of animal communication has shifted over the last few decades from using human language to using music as the orienting metaphor;• The evolution of (and scientific study of the evolution of) music-making in our species;• Pitch discrimination, beat entrainment, and musical memory (rhythm and frequency pattern detection, musical memory and capacity fo

Biological Time Travel: Organ Regeneration & Brain Reanimation – Turning back time in cells and tissues with the new medical techniques of bio-logics, simulating “t = 1” in the human body...This week’s guest is Ira Pastor, CEO of the revolutionary biomedical firm BioQuark in Philadelphia. I had no idea who these people were until Ira messaged me about appearing on the show…and I’m so glad he did, because otherwise I don’t k now when I would have learned about their work with new techniques that enable truly miraculous treatment of brain trauma, catastrophic organ failure, and other complex and confounding issues. We’re on the cusp of another moment in history when we have to redefine what it means to be “dead,” and how far someone can go before they’re irrecoverable. And at the prow of that epochal shift is BioQuark’s method of simulating ooplasm – in other words, “tricking” our cells into thinking that they’re fertilized ova at the very beginning of embryonic development, so they’ll do amazing feats that

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupThis week’s episode features returning guest JF Martel, film-maker, culture critic, and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. In his first appearance on Future Fossils, we discussed art as an opening to the transcendent and his awesome three-part essay on the philosophy of Netflix’s Stranger Things, “Reality Is Analog”…so it only made sense to have him back to weigh in on Stranger Things 2 and the extremely artful Blade Runner 2049, both of which speak directly to the evolution of the soul and “the human tragedy” in an increasingly digital age. It’s ultimately a discussion of The Sequel, and how what distinguishes good simulacra from bad is all in the label, “Made With Love”…JF’s book and blog:http://reclaimingart.comJF’s podcast:http://weirdstudies.comWe Discuss:- The humanization of replicants (and the “animalization” of a previously monstrous demogorgon) as empathetic characters in these stories, and

“Ah, eventually you DO plan to TALK ABOUT dinosaurs on this dinosaur podcast, right? Hello? Yes?”- Ian Malcolm about this episode.This week’s guest is professional dinosaur hunter Steve Brusatte, paleontology professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.https://twitter.com/stevebrusatteSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupBeyond being a totally awesome – and more importantly, FRESH – take on the Mesozoic Era that weaves vital updates from the last twenty years of discovery into the official story, this book also paints a rich and lively portrait of the human beings who actually do dinosaur science. Their stories moved me as much as the story of how the dinosaurs evolved, came to dominate the landscape, and then disappeared. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs offers more than the “what” of prehistory; it also offers us the “who” and “how” and “where” and “why,” and it will be

Tim Freke is a philosopher and the author of thirty five books on comparative religion, gnostic scholarship, and nondual awakening. I met him as a fellow speaker at the Global Eclipse Gathering in Oregon last year and was immediately taken by his bright presence, wit, and grounded genius. In this episode, we talk about imagination as a product of the evolutionary process – that the soul and afterlife might be themselves emergent properties, rather than fixed or prior qualities, of our cosmos’ continuous unfolding creativity.http://timfreke.com/http://timfreke.com/ONLINE-TOUR/COSTS.aspxSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion GroupWe take a deep dive into the nature of time, reality, and creativity:• Is spiritual awakening the “leading edge” of evolution? (Not technology, as proposed by Kevin Kelly et al.?)• How story may be more fundamental to reality than we’ve believed• Is evolutionary “novelty” created, or simply discovered lying in wait?• A psychedelic vi

This week we go deep in part two of my epic four-hour conversation with documentarian and gonzo journalist Charles Shaw – one of this show’s most requested return guests.In part one, Charles laid out the map of the problem: a world in crisis, an age of epidemic trauma and addiction. In this episode, we get into his self-experimentation with sleep deprivation to understand the hallucinatory reality of America’s homeless, his journey of healing and recovery working with entheogens and military veterans, and how facing and embracing our darkness with humility and courage may be the only way we can prepare ourselves to make a meaningful contribution to our world. Get ready for a heady brew of grit, dark humor, grief and relief, and the luminous truth that awaits us on the other side of suffering…Support these vital conversations with a small monthly contribution:http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart RadioJoin our Facebook Discussion Group––––––––––––––––Part O